This vivid space wallpaper resembles an abstract painting, or perhaps a contemporary stained-glass window. But it is actually an unusual view of a galaxy taken with the new MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope.

In this space wallpaper, sitting atop Cerro Paranal high above the Atacama Desert in Chile, two of the Very Large Telescope's Unit Telescopes quietly bask in the starlight, observing the Milky Way as it arches over ESO's Paranal Observatory.

Each of the colorful objects in this space wallpaper illustrates one of 30 merging galaxies. The contours in the individual galaxies show the signal strength from carbon monoxide while the color represents the motion of gas.

After sunset this evening, look 15 degrees up from the southwest horizon. There you’ll see a crescent moon, 30 percent illuminated. Hovering almost directly below it will be Mars, which looks like a moderately bright yellow-orange star.

Researchers using data gathered by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have determined that the supernova SN 1993J — which was first observed in 1993, as its name suggests — occurred because one star nabbed hydrogen from another.

The Chile-based Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and other telescopes employed a sort of cosmic magnifying glass to look at details of a galaxy called H1429-0028, revealing that the object is actually two merging galaxies.

The gas giant WASP-18b, 10X larger that Jupiter, orbits its relatively young parent star in just 23 hours. With the planet that close, the star’s magnetic field may be damped so much it is emitting x-rays at old age star rates.

This stunning space wallpaper from the VLT Survey Telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in northern Chile shows the globular cluster Messier 54. This cluster looks very similar to many others, but it has a secret.